TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

WE COULD NOT often be mad at them directly because we needed them for furniture, appliances, and food. We blamed them for what went wrong because we needed someone to blame, because we could not blame our husbands. But when the washing machines broke down and the General accused us of abusing them we had something to say: Have you ever done your family’s laundry, General? No? Thought not. We are not the ones to be accused of abuse .

WE ARGUED, UNREASONABLY, that the Army men had more money for new cars, because they always seemed to have them. Or maybe because they could not bring their wives they did not have them around to insist on home decorations—new linoleum, new curtains—and so did in fact have more to spare. They did not have to answer to a wife regarding their spending habits and so they did just what they wanted and bought a new car.

AND THOUGH OUR medical services were free, our doctors were Army doctors, and we had no choice about which doctor we preferred to see, but they weren’t so bad, and we joked privately over how these Army doctors had signed up to heal soldiers in battle and instead got us—a bunch of high-strung, healthy women complaining of headaches and morning sickness.

THE GENERAL NEVER missed an opportunity to say he, too, was a scientist, because he had obtained an undergraduate degree in engineering at West Point and had been the project manager for the construction of the Pentagon. He made it clear he did not want us here. He thought we would cause trouble, he thought we would be a distraction. And he wanted our husbands in uniform, beneath him, not wearing jeans, but they had refused to come on those grounds, and the General had to relent and instead our husbands stayed civilians, and we came along.

IF IT WAS evening when the military police stopped us, we had trouble holding our skirts down in the wind. We fumbled in our purses. They leaned in close to hear us say the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language: their own name.

WE HAD A fondness for the engineering division, who were the military, too, but only because they were forced to be. They were men with undergraduate degrees in engineering, and surely they annoyed MPs and sergeants with their disheveled look—their sloped shoulders from stooping over a table all day, their thick glasses, their gangly bodies with paunchy stomachs. And when they marched on weekends with the rest of the military, they were placed in the back as the caboose, and each of their steps was miraculously out of sync with the others.

For some of us, the proximity to a large number of single men revived our girlishness, and we curled our hair, or ironed it, applied lipstick, and smiled at ourselves in the mirror: to have a husband and a fantasy, to be admired at the age of twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-three, this felt like a good thing.

ON MONDAY MORNINGS the trashcans outside the WACs’ dorms were full of Coors beer cans. There were three hundred WACs and they had showers and two bathtubs to share among themselves, which they told us about on several occasions. Their hair could not touch their collar; they wore beige skirts and oxfords.

AT NIGHT WE COULD hear them gathered around campfires singing songs we did not know the names of but once they were in our heads we could not get them out:

AND WHEN WE were certain we could not take any more singing about military life we heard them marching and chanting:

THEIR VOICES CARRIED as they marched from the campfire to their dorm door and into their rooms.

THERE WAS NOT a bed check on Saturdays and on their days off they went to Santa Fe, perhaps watching the sunset on the roof of the La Fonda hotel, as we wished we could. One WAC, Pat, was rumored to, on her breaks, sleep in the stable next to the horses.

SOME WERE TEXANS who said little bitty and right nice and had names like Bobbie-Joe and Jimmie. Or they were former schoolteachers named Esther or Marian, from Indiana or Illinois, who said joining the Women’s Army Corps was the right thing to do. They organized the motor pool, shot dice, played the pump organ at church services, and called our husbands over the townwide intercom by their last names— Mitchell, Farmer, Perlman —but more frequently, about ten times a day, they called out Gutierraz and Marsh —the two maintenance men. They operated the telephones, censored our mail, and ran the PX, the diner where our husbands got their afternoon coffee and listened to the jukebox. They said they were proposed to once a month because there were ten military men on the Hill to every one of them.

IN APRIL THE cottonwoods in the valley began showing their green buds and the commissary carried huge hams for Easter. We reserved Fuller Lodge for Passover seder and prepared hundreds of matzo balls that the chef boiled in water instead of chicken stock. People said they tasted Excellent! but they did not. The chaplain, who was not asked to speak, gave a long talk about marauding tigers in India. We said it was a SNAFU, his speech and the matzo balls, an acronym we learned from the military: Situation normal, all fouled up .

IF WE WERE the proper type, we finally broke down and bought a pair of blue jeans, a jean shirt, and boots so we could ride the horses. The mountains still smelled to us like lavender and lemon verbena, and we hiked the Valle Grande, a mountain meadow the size of Manhattan that in spring became a purple field of wild irises. When we stopped walking we could hear the snakes rattling in the sagebrush.

WE TOOK THE horses down Frijoles Creek for fourteen miles before arriving at the meandering Rio Grande. We watched the migration of sandhill cranes, admired the fading blue color of the piñon jay, avoided the swimming garter snakes, and were grateful to see a group of mule deer fawns before they lost their spots. Tarantulas with orange tufts on their back ends walked along our hiking trails on warm spring days, but we were not scared. And though we feared mountain lions, black bears, and bobcats, their sightings were mythical.

WE CARRIED COATS for the horses and sausage and whiskey for us. We got drunk quickly from being so high up in the mountains and sometimes, we are sure, we acted strange or delightful. We called one another’s names and reached out our hands for the flask. We rode at night, even when it was raining, even when we were on a mountain ridge in the middle of a thunderstorm, in lightning. One night, after a long afternoon trip turned into an evening outing, with a full moon illuminating our trail, Alice said, Which way should we go? and we looked at her but did not reply. She continued, This way it’s only seven miles home , and pointed to the left. And this way is longer but much more beautiful , she said, and pointed to the right. We took the path to the right. And when we came home late, it was our husbands this time who walked out onto the porch as they heard our boot steps, folded their arms over their chests, and scowled. We laughed and said, Oh, Richard!

THE DIRECTOR GETTING down on one knee to talk to us, because we were sitting. The Director hosting dinner parties—making arugula and mint salad with an impossible-to-find pecorino cheese, creating prosciutto-and-gruyère-stuffed ravioli, presenting us with English plum pudding—dishes he claimed to have learned to make from the best chef in Italy , the grandest dame in Britain , or the finest lady from Arkansas , as he winked at us.